Claude Shannon loved to concoct pangrams – sentences which contain every letter in the alphabet. His tour de force – because it only used every letter once was: ‘Squdgy fez blank jimp crwth vox.’ It doesn’t make sense until you know the back-story. A man wearing a Turkish hat, or fez, of the squat and mashed, or squdgy style, is ...

Huawei expects 2021 revenue of $99.48 billion, 28.9% down on 2020. In a letter to employees, rotating chairman Guo Ping blamed “an unpredictable business environment, the politicisation of technology, and a growing deglobalisation movement.” US sanctions have denied Huawei acess to leading edge ICs, Android and the US telecoms market. “We need to stick to our strategy and respond rationally ...

The China government’s lockdown of the city of Xi’an could reverse the trend on memory prices which had been heading down before the Covid outbreak in the city, NAND suppliers stopped quoting prices following a statement from Samsung saying “we have decided to temporarily adjust operations at our manufacturing facilities in Xi’an, China. We will also take all necessary measures, ...

Techinsights, the IC reverse engineering specialists, has made significant investment in its lab technology, with the commitment to purchase the following in 2022: A new Raith CHIPSCANNER A new Ion Beam Etcher A new TALOS TEM from ThermoFisher (formerly FEI) “The Raith CHIPSCANNER will ‘future proof’ us, furthering TechInsights’ ability to image at the 3nm node,” says the company, “fortunately, ...

While conventional electronics relies on the transport of electrons, components that convey spin information alone may be many times more energy efficient. Physicists at the Technical University of Munich (TUM) and the Max Planck Institute for Solid State Research in Stuttgart have now made an important advance in the development of novel materials for such components. These materials may also ...

Capacitorless  indium-gallium-zinc-oxide (IGZO DRAM is a suitable candidate for realizing high-density 3D DRAM, says Imec. Imec has developed  a fully 300mm BEOL compatible IGZO-based capacitorless DRAM cell with >103s retention and unlimited (>1011) endurance. These results were obtained after selecting the most optimal integration scheme for the single IGZO transistors, i.e., a gate-last integration scheme with buried oxygen tunnel and ...

Tencent  and Alibaba are out of the world’s top ten most valuable companies measured by market cap and TSMC enters  the list at No.10, reports the Nikkei. The Chinese tech giants have been battered by government regulation leaving no Chinese company in the top 10. In 2007, it had four.

60 years ago this year, two of the Fairchild founders, in a deal set up by Arthur Rock, left to form a new semiconductor company in Mountain View. Later two more of the Fairchild founders joined the new company. To avoid getting sued by Fairchild it initially focussed on supplying the military. JFETS were the company’s most successful parts and, ...

One of the companies said to be preparing to apply for government incentives to set up IC  manufacturing in India is Intel, reports The India Express. It is being said that the proposed plant would be aimed at the 18A generation of Intel’s processes, the most advanced on its announced schedule, which is slated for introduction in H2 2025. The ...

MikroElektronika (MIKROE) has launched Waveform 4 Click – a member of its +1000-strong Click family of peripheral development boards – that operates as a signal generator for high-speed, high-dynamic-range, multichannel complex waveforms. Applications include as ultrasound transducer excitation, medical instrumentation, portable instrumentation, signal generators, and arbitrary waveform generators. Waveform 4 Click features Analog Devices’ AD9106, a quad-channel, 12-bit, 180MSPS waveform ...